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WBYR Changing City of License...

Juan Bodley

Juan Bodley

I saw that WBYR (98.9 The Bear) changed their city of license from Van Wert, OH, to Woodburn, IN.
The question I have for all of you great gurus out there is: Why would they do that??

The only reason I could think of has to do with a rumor that's been posted elsewhere about Federated Media having interest in Clear Channel's Van Wert cluster of stations. (if I recall correctly...they would buy CC's stations there, and then maybe swap 98.1 and 106.7's programming...) PLEASE remember friends this is coming from my noggin...I don't want to spend 3 days looking for the threads/posts/where I saw it.

Anyone care to speculate/inform/correct me/set me straight/kick me in the temple??? ;D
 
The tower was closer to Fort Wayne a few years ago. (I think it's down by Monroeville...)
The moving city of license came across my attention span last week, but this was the first chance I had to ask the "peanut gallery" ;) about it...
 
CC had no Van Wert stations...maybe you're thinking Definace? I've heard no "rumblings" on a Federated Pick up of their CC stations, but it's entirely possible. Doing a change of COL MIGHT be a sign of someone swapping signals.
 
Juan Bodley said:
The only reason I could think of has to do with a rumor that's been posted elsewhere about Federated Media having interest in Clear Channel's Van Wert cluster of stations. (if I recall correctly...they would buy CC's stations there, and then maybe swap 98.1 and 106.7's programming...) PLEASE remember friends this is coming from my noggin...I don't want to spend 3 days looking for the threads/posts/where I saw it.
Click to expand...

http://boards.radio-info.com/smf/index.php/topic,88827.msg676398.html#msg676398 is the posting you are probably thinking of.

I read WBYR moving COL's a few weeks ago, but I forget where.
 
WBYR changing COL to Woodburn, IN, frees them to move the tower site closer to Fort Wayne, which wasn’t possible with the station licensed to Van Wert. A substitution doesn’t make sense, unless there was something in Woodburn to move-out...
 
It actually allows WKSD to change its city of license to Scott Ohio which is a Van Wert County community. There was a deal wayyyy back when they sold the signal to Ft. Wayne that WKSD would have to remain licensed to Paulding Co. unless they moved the COL to Indiana.

Of course, it sounds like to me there could be a bigger move behind this as well, but that signal cant move any closer to Ft. Wayne then where it currently sits.

Thus here is the whole deal. WDFM can now change its COL to Paulding - Fort Wayne if they so wish!
 
They have a killer signal anyway, so why would they worry about it,, It can be frequently heard clearly in Indianapolis and even in Cincinatti,, so why move closer and downgrade? Did they have to downgrade?
 
The signal does get out. When WBYR was on the Arcola tower at least, they did have issues in downtown Ft. Wayne, especially with building penetration.
 
gr8oldies said:
When WBYR was on the Arcola tower at least
Click to expand...

Do you mean WBYR was on the same tower as B-106? At least that's the only Arcola tower I can think of.

When was this? When did WBYR move sites to southeast of Fort Wayne?
 
Unless I have my towns mixed up, they were originally on a tower between Van Wert and Ft. Wayne. Can't imagine B106 being on a tower east of town and still getting city grade over Columbia City
 
WBYR has a great signal and I dont believe there are ANY plans to downgrade it at all, or in the forseable future.

By them moving it to Woodburn, there could be multiples of opportunities here. Most likely this has something to do with Defiance.
 
WBYR has been on the same tower, with the same facilities (50 kW/453') since it took on its current calls in 1989 and began operating as a Fort Wayne station. It's southwest of Monroeville, off Whittern Road.

Before the 1989 move, it was running 50 kW at 130' from, if I'm not mistaken, the WERT(AM) tower in Van Wert.

WBYR's COL change won't have any direct effect on WKSD or WDFM.

WKSD can't change COL from Paulding as long as it's the only service licensed there, which it is. (As for the idea that there was some sort of contractual restriction on moving the station into Van Wert County related to the sale of 98.9, nothing doing there. First of all, such a restriction wouldn't pass FCC muster; second, 99.7 didn't even sign on until the fall of 1989, almost a year after 98.9 had left its Van Wert roots behind. Given how vigorously WBYR wanted to portray itself as a "Fort Wayne" station after the move, it's hard to imagine its new owners would have cared whether the new FM across the Ohio line was licensed to Van Wert County or Paulding County.

As for WDFM, it's one of four signals licensed to Defiance (WONW, WZOM, WGDE), so it's free to change COL at will. I think it could probably be moved closer to Fort Wayne, but ownership has never seemed very interested in that.
 
There is no CC presence in Van Wert nor there is a cluster..Van Wert is on the fringe outskirts of the Lima,Ohio market.
 
OK just to clairify...
I screwed up when I said that Clear Channel was in Van Wert...I got ahead of myself. I know that they're in Defiance, but I was hurrying to put this up before I forgot.
And let me say thanks to Mr. Fybush for his EXCELLENT info. (do you have friends in FedMed or did you just call Jack or Mogan?? I think they really detest me now... ;D)

What made me think that Clear Channel and Federated had something going on may have come from some other board (I don't think it was Blaine's postings...I think) but I had seen other speculation about a sale - JUST SPECULATION - and I wanted to know if that's what this was leading to, since WBYR was licensed to Van Wert originally.

Are we clear now?? God I hope so...
 
Juan Bodley said:
And let me say thanks to Mr. Fybush for his EXCELLENT info. (do you have friends in FedMed or did you just call Jack or Mogan?? I think they really detest me now... ;D)
Click to expand...

I do have friends in FedMed - and friends who were involved in the move back in '89 - but no need to bother Jack or Mogan in this case, when a stack of old Broadcasting Yearbooks and the FCC database are closer at hand.

(Anyway, they're probably kind of swamped, what with K105 having been off the air for going on two days now...)
 
I don't normally listen to K105 so I didn't know they were down.
And I forgot about checking the FCC database. (I hear things, and then I have to wait until I have internet access to see what's being said/posted/pondered/ballyhooed around in here and elsewhere. Like Indiana Radiowatch...that Blaine has his mitts in everything. haha.)

I'd hate to be whoever is teching for WAJI and Matt Kyle of WFWA-TV. They went off sometime on Friday and haven't seen anything from them since. (WISE-TV was out but WPTA stayed on...they're on the SAME ANTENNA - I think...at least the same tower.) Funny though that WFFT-TV, and WMEE (and whoever else is on that tower) stayed on. This power grid in town is not laid out the way I thought it should be.
 
Juan Bodley said:
I'd hate to be whoever is teching for WAJI and Matt Kyle of WFWA-TV. They went off sometime on Friday and haven't seen anything from them since. (WISE-TV was out but WPTA stayed on...they're on the SAME ANTENNA - I think...at least the same tower.) Funny though that WFFT-TV, and WMEE (and whoever else is on that tower) stayed on. This power grid in town is not laid out the way I thought it should be.
Click to expand...

That, and some stations have generators in place. (WANE, for instance.)

WISE-DT will eventually be over at WPTA, but for now it and 33 analog are still at the old tower on West State.

My ears in FW tell me WGL-FM is out, also...and that K isn't even on the air via stream, since there's no net access on Maples Road for the moment. (No streaming for WOWO or WMEE, either...)
 
Scott Fybush said:
That, and some stations have generators in place. (WANE, for instance.)

WISE-DT will eventually be over at WPTA, but for now it and 33 analog are still at the old tower on West State.
Click to expand...

Well I wish they would have had that generator at WANE when I worked there!!! (1996 for those keeping score...)
Would have saved a few headaches at 2 in the AM...
And I thought (again) that WPTA and WISE were already combined. I gotta stop assuming these things.
Scott you are a fountain of information.

Now we should return this thread to it's original programming.
Except my question has been answered. So let's let it go to paid programming, as is the norm these days.
 
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